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Hands On Lessons Keep Work Fun

After the third time the boys asked me to please start school, I knew I had to set aside what I was working on and start school. I had a few ideas for some fun lessons but mostly let them guide us through our day.

We began by reading and we finished The Robot King. I thought it was a pretty weird story and at the end none of us were all that certain if we had liked it or not. We read another chapter in Surviving the Applewhites and then I pulled out our math story for the day. It was called One Hungry Cat and it used division and fractions.

The boys thought it was a cute story and laughed over the illustrations.

Before sitting down to read I had written out many multiplication and division problems onto sticky notes and put them over the wall so that Ian and Alec could play math slam (where they throw the ball at the problems on the wall and shout out the answer to any of the papers they hit).

This turned into chaos.

They were whipping the balls so hard at the wall they almost knocked pictures off the wall in the other room. They fought over whose turn it was and kept running in asking me who was right, whose turn it was and tattling on each other.

I had to stop the game and send them into the other room so Evan and I could finish our work.

Evan then breezed through his two books and I showed him our sight word practice board.

I had written out the same sight words we've been using all week (mat, sat, cat, and, the, on, Sam, sad) on our chalkboard and I gave him a cup of water and a paintbrush. He read the words to me and then traced over them with the water/brush to make them disappear.

He thought it was a pretty fun activity and he got a few of the words right! He even sounded one of them out with very little help from me. I felt like that was finally some progress!

When Evan was done I called Alec over to play the math slam game and then when he was done I sat and watched Ian play. I think if we tried this game again with the older two boys I would only play it outside. For sanity's sake!

I think it was great that Ian came up with the idea to modify Evan's game from the other day to use it as math and I think it was wonderful that he's been asking me for a few days to play and practice his math facts, but I think they're just a bit too big to play ballgames inside.

While I was watching Ian throw the ball and figure out his answers, Evan told me he wanted to make up a sight word hide and seek game. He pulled out my sticky notes and started writing down the words we've been practicing onto each note (he tried to use the chalk board to help him when he could but not all the letters were visible so he tried sounding them out, asking myself or Alec for help when needed).

The rules of his game were very unclear to me, but I was happy he was writing and practicing his words without having been asked or even really seeming to realize it. He hid the sticky notes around the house as he finished writing each word and told us we'd all have to hide later when he was finished setting up... though he never did finish. I'm not sure if he forgot or just lost interest but I figure at some point he'll want to finish setting it up and we'll get to play.

In the meantime we went on to lesson two in the Incite to Write series. The lesson was called The Blank Canvas and rather just talking I gave them each some paper, pencils, watercolors and brushes.

I told them I was thinking of my favorite dessert and they had to ask me all the questions they could think of in order to draw what I was picturing as my favorite dessert.

They started asking me things like

what does it taste like

where we eat it

what kind of cake I liked.

They slowly started realizing that not all questions would help them draw it. By the end I think all three boys did a pretty good job of drawing the cake I was thinking of-- don't you??

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